Gendering Democratic Resilience: Towards A Comparative Framework

The majority of studies on democratic backsliding and gender equality in recent years have tended to focus on the emergence and relative success of anti-gender movements in pushing for a restrictive agenda on reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017, Krizsán and Roggeband 2018, Krizsán and Roggeband 2021). In contrast, the question of democratic resilience - of how democratic actors and institutions can counteract the backlash against reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights - has received less attention in recent scholarship. Our aim in this paper is threefold. First, we aim to bridge the gap between scholarship on democratic resilience and scholarship on gender, neither of which are currently integrating each other’s perspectives and insights. Thus, we aim to gender the concept of democratic resilience in ways that help us examine and conceptualise the conditions under which democratic actors’ resistance to these movements is successful. Secondly, we aim to develop a typology of democratic resilience from the perspective of gender in ways that enable us to have a systematic understanding of feminist and LGBTQ+ actors’ pathways towards democratic resilience. Thirdly, we aim to flesh out this typology through case studies of successful resistance to ‘anti-gender’ movements in Central and Eastern Europe. We examine four case studies of democratic resilience in the post-communist region: Romania’s ‘gender identity’ bill (2020), Slovenia’s same-sex marriage legislation (2022), Poland’s post-2015 feminist mobilisations, and Latvia’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention (2021-23).